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Barefoot Run Ends in Bahamas

A self-portrait of Colton Harris-Moore from July 2009, left, and Mr. Harris-Moore, with shackles but no shoes, on Sunday in Nassau, the Bahamas.Credit
Left, Island County Sheriffs Office, via Associated Press; Felipe Major/Associated Press

SEATTLE — His ride ended the way it began: shoes off, in the islands. Just not his islands.

This time, Colton Harris-Moore, the tall teenager accused of being the “Barefoot Bandit” who once hopscotched the San Juan Islands of the Pacific Northwest riding stolen speedboats and airplanes, Facebook fame and boundless gumption, crash-landed in the Bahamas. And this time, he was caught.

Early Sunday, after Mr. Harris-Moore had fled across the continent, the police in the Bahamas arrested him after they shot out the engines on his stolen boat and roared up beside him in open waters in the middle of the night. It had been more than two years since he had vanished from a halfway house in the Seattle suburbs in 2008 and begun eluding repeated efforts to track him in the dense forests of the Northwest.

American authorities said it could have been the success of Mr. Harris-Moore’s trek itself — making it all the way to the Bahamas — that ultimately led to his downfall.

“It was inevitable that he would make a wrong move. He was in a different culture. He probably stood out,” Sheriff Bill Cumming of San Juan County in Washington said of Mr. Harris-Moore. Now 19, he is 6-foot-5 and white.

While Mr. Harris-Moore had thousands of followers on Facebook — and his mother has hired a prominent entertainment lawyer to field proposals about his tale — his victims saw little romance in his spree.

“It was always in the back of your mind, you’re kind of wondering, when’s the next one coming?” said Scott Lancaster, who owns a hardware store on Orcas Island, Wash., that the police believe Mr. Harris-Moore burglarized twice, once stealing bolt cutters and $4,000. “It’s a bit unsettling. We were all locking our doors and we never had before.”

By the time the sun came up on Sunday, Mr. Harris-Moore was shackled and wearing a bulletproof vest as he was escorted to jail. His feet were still bare on the hot Caribbean concrete.

A statement by the Royal Bahamas Police Force noted that their search “lasted for all but seven days.” Joel Lewis, 73, a cabdriver in Nassau, was at the airport when Mr. Harris-Moore was brought in by police airplane from Eleuthera. “I was asking, ‘What are all these police doing all over the place?’ Then I hear it’s just for one guy!” he said. “He wouldn’t raise up his head at all. He was walking with it down.”

Mr. Lewis said the plane was met by local police who boarded the plane and chained Mr. Harris-Moore. Mr. Harris-Moore was wearing short pants and shuffling with shackles around his ankles and handcuffs behind his back.

He is due in court in Nassau on Tuesday. He faces dozens of charges in the United States, including a federal warrant on charges of stealing a plane last fall in Bonners Ferry, Idaho.

Photo

The Homegrown Market put up a sign after the store was burglarized.Credit
Meredith Griffith/Islands' Sounder, via Associated Press

The authorities in Washington had spent two years tracking Mr. Harris-Moore, after they linked him to scores of crimes in the San Juans and nearby, from stealing cash and tools to speedboats and small airplanes, which they say he repeatedly crashed.

This spring, the police believed they had Mr. Harris-Moore surrounded in the Turtleback Mountain area of Orcas Island. Sheriff’s deputies were joined by dog teams and helicopter pilots from the Department of Homeland Security.

“He was seen,” Sheriff Cumming said. “But it’s very, very rugged and very difficult to cover all that area extensively and completely. He was able to elude, and that was frustrating and expensive.”

Sheriff Cumming, who is retiring this year, said the search had affected his agency’s budget, in part because the department had to pay overtime to its 20 officers, who patrol four major islands and many more smaller ones. It was that search that appears to have prompted a series of boat and plane thefts that led Mr. Harris-Moore far beyond his Northwest comfort zone.

Last month, a South Dakota family was reportedly startled to find a man believed to be Mr. Harris-Moore in their home, naked. Once again, he slipped away.

Photo

The Curly Tails bar and restaurant in Marsh Harbour, the Bahamas, where the owner says a security camera caught Mr. Harris-Moore on video on Tuesday. Credit
Mike Melia/Associated Press

“This was his full-time job,” Sheriff Cumming said. “He was not a casual fugitive. This was what he did on a full-time basis, and we do give him credit in terms of his ability to plan his activities and his escape routes.”

First arrested at age 12 for several crimes, including setting fire to Stanwood Middle School, Mr. Harris-Moore had a difficult upbringing on Camano Island. He was raised largely by his mother, who he said could be abusive, according to several news media accounts over the years.

His mother, Pam Kohler, has urged her son to continue to flee and fretted publicly that she hoped he would be more careful about the planes he stole — preferably avoiding single-engine aircraft. She has told reporters that she hoped he would flee to a country that does not allow for extradition to the United States. The Bahamas does allow extradition.

In April, Variety reported that 20th Century Fox was buying the film rights to “Taking Flight: The Hunt for a Young Outlaw,” based on a story about Mr. Harris-Moore by Bob Friel in Outside magazine in January.

A “Colton Harris-Moore Fan Club” page on Facebook with more than 23,000 followers describes him like this: “Western Washington’s new Jesse James (without the murders). Without a doubt one of the greatest and most notable outlaws to come from an otherwise boring area. Some of his greatest achievements include the Kamikaze theft and crash landing of three airplanes (with no flight training) as well as commandeering a couple boats. Let’s hope that he remains healthy, free and at large for a long time! Fly Colton, Fly!”

Much has been made of Mr. Harris-Moore’s ability to disappear into the evergreen forests of the Northwest, his ability to pick locks, navigate dark channels by boat and fly planes without any professional training.

Law enforcement officials in Washington State expressed frustration at what they said was the glamorous light in which he has sometimes been cast, including the idea that he was harmless.

“What if that plane landed on a day care or a house?” said Steven Dean, the assistant special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Seattle field office. “He’s potentially dangerous.”

At the same time, they said Mr. Harris-Moore was not necessarily their most sought-after target.

“To say he posed no danger is not necessarily accurate, and to say we spent every waking moment looking for him is not accurate either,” Mr. Dean added. “He was just another fugitive to us. The media made him bigger than he really was.”

Still, his profile was rising with law enforcement, too. In December, Mr. Harris-Moore was charged in federal court in Washington with stealing a $340,000 plane from Bonners Ferry, Idaho, and crash-landing it near Granite Falls, Wash. The court documents also detail firearm thefts in British Columbia and “bare footprints consistent with those left by Harris-Moore at other crime scenes.”

It was unclear how soon Mr. Harris-Moore might return to face charges in the United States.